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L’Impératif Passé: La Mémoire Comme Protagoniste Du Théâtre De Michel Tremblay, Fátima Elizabeth Costa Buchert

Doctoral Dissertations

Michel Tremblay, the most important contemporary playwright (and novelist) in Quebec, has written for the theatre for over forty years. The study of his plays, beginning with the very first ones, reveals the capital importance that he attributes to the problem of the past and of memory.

This dissertation examines how memory plays the role of protagonist in Tremblay’s drama: the study of Les Belles-Soeurs, (the writer’s first famous play, where memory is a tool for building gender identity), of Le Vrai Monde? (one of his most complex plays, where memory is concretely represented on the stage) and of …

Citizens (Or Citoyennes) Of The World: Women’S Citizenship And Exile In The French Revolutionary Years 1789-1793, Lisa Michelle Christian

Masters Theses

This study examines the fluid definitions of citizenship during the French Revolution, especially citizenship’s relationship to exile. I assert that citizenship was always defined by who could not be citizens. Furthermore, this study focuses upon women’s experience of citizenship and exile for their especial vulnerability to exclusion from public and political affairs. In particular, I address the political actions of Parisian common women, and the political actions and writings of the English exiles Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft. Essentially, this study has three distinct parts that demonstrate the development of women’s citizenship during the Revolution and the causes of …

Women’S Mysticism In The Late Middle Ages: The Influence Of Affective Love And The Courtly Love Tradition, Allison Jaines Elledge

Masters Theses

This thesis will focus on the devotional accounts of several influential women living in European cloisters or other religious communities during the twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries, such as Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mary of Oignies, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg. I will explore how the rhetoric of love, selfknowledge, intention, and the focus on Christ’s humanity influenced the development of theological themes that affected their experiences and featured prominently in their writing. Finally, this thesis will examine the influence of affective mysticism and of courtly love poetry on the genre of medieval religious literature reporting mystical encounters with …

Enshrining, Adapting And Contesting The Latin Apology Of Al-Kindi: Readers' Interactions With An Authoritative Polemic Against Islam, Leah Jenkins Giamalva

Masters Theses

In this study, I have examined the use of the Latin translation of the Arabic Apology of al-Kindi,, regarded as the most influential source of information about Islam for Latin readers in the Middle Ages, by some of its readers from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. My work is divided into three parts, beginning with an analysis of the writings of the man who commissioned the translation, Peter the Venerable, and Peter of Poitiers, the secretary of the first Peter and a member of the translation team. I argue that, for Peter the Venerable, the Latin translation of …

A Migration Of Tastes: New York City And American Naturalism, 1890-1925, Tyler James Weseman

Masters Theses

Changes in the literary evaluation/reception of American Naturalism are related to changes in both literary criticism and American publishing. Naturalism responded to vigorous cultural issues of the time, but its chief focus was on the role of biology, class, and environment in the development of the individual. As a result, the response to Naturalism by American criticism was as much a response to these issues as it was to the literature itself, and the tenor of the responses near the turn of the century often reflected the differing values of criticism originating either in New York or Boston. By looking …

Setting The Record Straight: Anne W. Armstrong, Regionalism, And The Social Efficacy Of Fiction, Katherine Hoffman Doman

Doctoral Dissertations

Categorized by the few critics who know her work as a "minor" Appalachian writer, Anne Wetzell Armstrong has never enjoyed the recognition she deserves. But she produced an important body of work, including fiction, non-fiction and drama. In the 1970‘s, critic Elaine Showalter led the gynocritical effort to recover women writers and inspired the reintroduction of a number of overlooked authors. This national impulse and the positive reception of its results has driven, in turn, an interest in similar regional efforts—hence my own interest in recovering the work of Armstrong, whose work has value in both national and regional contexts. …

Field Portrait: Poems, Jesse Kendall Graves

Doctoral Dissertations

This creative dissertation is a collection of original poems entitled Field Portrait. The poems in Field Portrait emerge from a long apprenticeship to the aesthetics of poetry, and to the study of how work, family, history, community, and landscape have been represented by poets in the western literary tradition. Many of the poems in Field Portrait are set in rural eastern Tennessee where I grew up, but several poems respond to other places I have lived and visited, such as upstate New York and New Orleans, Louisiana. My poems aspire to an integrated relationship between description and perception, in …

"Of Beggeris And Of Bidderis What Best Be To Doone?": The Problem Of Poverty In Piers Plowman, Dina Bevin Hess

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine William Langland’s continual wrestling with issues of poverty, both voluntary and involuntary, in Piers Plowman. The poem raises a multitude of questions, but to each question a multitude of contradictory answers is proposed, none of which is long permitted to remain unchallenged. The initially bewildering complexity of the representation of poverty found within the poem, however, may be clarified through the recognition of two fundamental underlying themes: caritas and justitia. Langland relies throughout the poem upon well-established tenets of medieval theology; what sets Piers apart is not that the central …

The First New South: J. D. B. De Bow’S Promotion Of A Modern Economy In The Old South, John Franklin Kvach

Doctoral Dissertations

Between 1846 and 1867, J. D. B. De Bow, the editor of De Bow’s Review, promoted agricultural reform, urbanization, industrialization, and commercial development in the nineteenth-century South. His monthly journal appealed to thousands of antebellum southerners with similar interests in a modern market economy. De Bow’s vision and his readers’ support of economic diversification predated the rhetoric of postbellum boosters who promised a New South after the Civil War. He created an economic plan that resonated among urban, middle-class merchants and professionals; wealthy planters; and prominent industrialists. They supported De Bow because he understood the necessity of economic diversification. …

Standing In The Shadow Of The Greatest Generation: Men And Women Of The Korean War, Melinda Leigh Pash

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation takes a fresh look at the forgotten generation of servicemen and women who served in theater during the Korean War. Beginning with their shared childhood, growing up during the Great Depression and World War II, this narrative account follows the story of American men and women as they enlisted in or were drafted into the Armed Forces, took basic training, shipped out to the Korean Peninsula or Japan, lived in the war zone, and returned home to a country that seemed not to have noticed their absence. Special attention is paid throughout to the complex interplay between service …

Max Liebermann’S Jewish Heritage, Romana Rouskova

Masters Theses

This thesis asks to what degree Max Liebermann (1847-1935) may be looked on as a Jewish artist. It examines the relationship as it is seen in his Jewish family background, in traditions rooted in Sittlichkeit and Bildung, such as diligence, and it also finds Jewish themes in a limited number of his art works. The first chapter examines Liebermann’s family history and his career as a painter influenced by Dutch and French artists. The second chapter looks at the ways critics have tried to assess this relationship. The opinions of art historian critics from Liebermann’s own time, such as Karl …

A Paradox Of Self-Image: William Shakespeare’S The Merchant Of Venice And King Richard Ii In Hitler’S Germany, Bradley Michael Blair

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the connection between the cultural authorities of the Third Reich and the works of William Shakespeare. Nazi cultural authorities utilized theater as a milieu of representation wherein the Third Reich showcased its underlying ideological principles. However, Shakespeare's works, because of his humanist concern for the problems of the individual, create numerous difficulties that arise with any effort to align his works as a whole with a single set of ideological principles. The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's most famously Jewish play, appears on the surface to present the Nazi cultural authorities with a prime opportunity to showcase anti-Semitic …

Abject Horror And The Renaissance Imagination: Plotting The Intersection Of Human And Monster In Book I Of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Melissa Joy Rack

Masters Theses

The 16^th century marked an explosion of interest in “true” accounts of monsters and monstrous births in early modern England. The fascination with grotesqueries and objects of wonder was a curious preoccupation of the learned elite of the Elizabethan court. The influence of early modern medical texts that anatomized such creatures, and historical chronicles that attempted to explain the “unnatural” aspects of the natural world, can be traced in Book I of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. This thesis is concerned with the way Spenser revises the characteristic tropes of these early modern texts to present monstrosity in his …

Embodied Vision: Sublimity And Mystery In The Fiction Of Flannery O’Connor, Andrew Patrick Hicks

Masters Theses

This thesis serves as a study of representative pieces of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction alongside three particular theories of the sublime, and offers an exploration of the ways in which O’Connor employs and modifies and aesthetics of sublimity throughout her fiction. Three particular theories of the sublime are considered throughout this study: Edmund Burke’s empiricist sublime, Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern sublime, and Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt’s theological sublime. Burke’s theory is considered alongside both the early O’Connor story “The Turkey” and the later “Greenleaf,” while the story “Parker’s Back” is read in light of Lyotard’s theory and the novel The Violent Bear It …

American Daoism: A New Religious Movement In Global Contexts, Steven San-Hu Chan

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the phenomenon of American Daoism. It assumes that American Daoism is a New Religious Movement, and argues that it has roots in counterhegemonic religious movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I will explore these roots and describe how they are counter-hegemonic. Furthermore, I will build upon Elijiah Siegler’s doctoral dissertation, “The Dao of America: The History and Practice of American Daoism,” by using post-modern theories of identity to discuss how American Daoist identity is formed. This thesis argues that American Daoist identity is a combination of Chinese and American cultural objects that form a hybrid religious …

Pulling The Moon Card, Gabrielle Lea Kindell

Masters Theses

The purpose of this thesis was to creatively explore emotionally intense and transformative moments in the author’s life through the use of poetry. The intention was to create poetry that served as a means for creative expression. The poetry here functions both to document the author’s life, to express the author’s feelings and thoughts of her life, and as art that should provide readers with the feeling that they have suddenly entered the mind, heart and experience of another person.

While much of the poetry is specific to the author’s life, some of the poems, especially those in the “Justice …

Methodism And Moral Character: The Function Of Methodist Satire In Henry Fielding’S Novels, Caitlin Lee Kelly

Masters Theses

This thesis explores Henry Fielding’s satiric representations of Methodism and Methodists in his novels Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia. By examining these Methodist representations and by using them to chart a progression across Fielding’s career as a novelist, Methodism emerges as a point of intersection with his larger concern about the effects of moral character on the stability of society. Fielding reveals the problem surrounding moral character through the villainy of hypocrites, which requires a shrewd observer to overcome. In an effort to provide a solution to this problem, Fielding asserts in “An Essay on the Knowledge …

Love And Privacy: Three Stories, Alexandra Staunton Zinke

Masters Theses

This thesis is compiled of stories written and revised while the author was a Master‟s candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Accompanying these stories is a brief introduction in which the author considers elements of craft in fiction.

Ich-Sicht Und Sprachverlust: Werthers Liebestod, David Kaspar Schulz

Masters Theses

This thesis discusses how Werther’s death in Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther should be understood. The central question is how Goethe portrays the correlation between Werther’s love and his death. Love is presented in the novel as a process eventually leading to the loss of the ability to live; Werther’s end is seen as a necessary consequence of the process. Werther himself describes the paradox that is to be explained by this thesis: „Mu[ss] denn das so sein, daß das, was des Menschen Glückseligkeit macht, wieder die Quelle seines Elendes würde?" (51) In this passage Goethe points to a …

Peer Versus Self Corrections And The Pursuit Of Grammatical Accuracy In Fl Writing: Student Perceptions And Realities, Mary Elizabeth Schonagen

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate peer and self corrections in the context of foreign language writing and, more specifically, any potential correlations between correction type and the ability to correct for grammatical accuracy. Correlations were also sought between correction type and student awareness of error tendencies. The present study also explored students’ perceptions of teacher, peer, and self corrections in writing, including preferences, validities, and the emotional (affective) responses. Ninety-six university students in their second year of German as a foreign language wrote a narrative essay. During the next class meeting, students either corrected their own essays …

Gender, Genre, And The Victorian Dramatic Monologue, Kasey Bass Baker

Doctoral Dissertations

Gender, Genre, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue describes how female and male poets used the dramatic monologue to create a dialogue about gender and subjectivity. I first chart the evolution of the dramatic monologue by explaining changing Victorian literary critical values as evident in the use of the terms subjective and objective. As opposed to earlier literary interest in objectivity, later Victorian poets use the monologue to experiment with new subject positions, valuing individual perspectives most. I trace this pattern in the way Victorian poets across the period use the developing monologue to create often simultaneous and overlapping conversations …

México Visto Desde La Literatura De Su Frontera Norte: Identidades Propias De La Transculturación Y La Migración, Lori Celaya

Doctoral Dissertations

Until recently, Mexican identity at Mexico’s northern border had been viewed as a marginal manifestation of Mexican culture. This characterization resulted from centrist ideologies that were rooted in a homogeneous concept of mexicanness. Furthermore, the belief that the border was a peripheral culture was influenced by the border’s proximity to the United States. Over time, border identity has evolved to one which affirms and defines itself through its diversity. Such a concept has been captured in a view of the Mexican nation that has been increasingly contested from different vantage points which are both convergent and divergent.

This dissertation …

Rights Of Passage: Immigrant Fiction, Religious Ritual, And The Politics Of Liminality, 1899-1939, Laura Patton Samal

Doctoral Dissertations

The novels written by immigrants to the United States during the great wave of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal a preoccupation with religious ritual as a major means through which they depict the tensions and dynamics at work in the immigration experience and the confrontation with American culture. This dissertation establishes the significance of religious ritual in novels written by immigrants to the United States between 1899 and 1939, and delineates the important spiritual, social, and political functions such ritual served by way of its special properties. I argue that immigrant writers used ritual as …

Aspects Of First Language Attrition: A Case Study Of German Immigrants In East Tennessee, Raluca Mihaela Negrisanu

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines aspects of first language attrition (L1= German) in a second language (L2= English) environment. It sheds light on language contact and attrition research and focuses on first generation German immigrants to East Tennessee who were administered a series of tests to ascertain their language attrition to establish extralinguistic factors promoting or inhibiting it.

The Study Group consisted of 22 German immigrants to the U.S., both men and women, aged between 27 and 68, who emigrated as late teens or adults and have been here for more than three years. The Control Group consisted of 12 German native …

Zen Buddhism And American Religious Culture: A Case Study Of Daistez Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966), Christopher Robert Pinder

Masters Theses

This work explores the life, works, and role of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966) in the reception of Zen Buddhism in the United States. Particular attention is paid to the major themes that informed Suzuki’s presentation of Zen to American audiences: Western mystical-universalist traditions, intellectualism, psychology and Japanese nationalism. These themes, as Suzuki used them, are not part of traditional Zen in Japan; instead they are responses to Western modernity, colonialism, and Orientalist discourses. Suzuki and many of his contemporaries rephrased Zen in order to assert Japanese cultural and religious superiority.

Suzuki was a prolific writer and his books became the …

Bridging The Popular Divide: Forging German Identity In The Agrarian League, 1893-1918, Mccall P. Simon

Masters Theses

This work examines the nature of the community of the German Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte). In particular, it focuses on the interactions of the elite, Junker membership and the peasant membership. An examination of previous work reveals a theme of Junker domination of the League. This work challenges that theme by examining one possible avenue for agency within the League: the associated newspapers. Using Benedict Anderson's theory of printcapitalism and Marshall Sahlins' definitions of community interactions and space definition, it becomes possible to reveal a non-coerced peasant voice within the League by searching for rhetorical shifts in the …

A New Approach To The Devīmāhātmya: The Greatness Of The Goddess In Its Purāṇic Context, Elizabeth A. Cecil

Masters Theses

Although the text of the Devīmāhātmya is itself a section of the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa, recent scholarship has taken a primarily extrinsic approach to the text and its use by emphasizing the life of the Devīmāhātmya (henceforth DM) well apart from the textual tradition of the purāṇas. A reading of the DM in the context of the MārkP is instructive, because it reveals some interesting thematic connections that are indicative of larger thematic trends within the purāṇa, which prior extrinsic studies have not explored. Broadly speaking, these themes glorify women and Goddesses as positive manifestations of some fundamental female …

The Dial And The Transcendentalist Theory Of Reading, Emily A. Cope

Masters Theses

The two major anthologies of Transcendentalism, Perry Miller’s The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (1950) and Joel Myerson’s Transcendentalism: A Reader (2000), illustrate the scholarly divide over whether the movement was primarily religious or social and political in nature. Where Miller’s volume prioritizes the Transcendentalists’ theological radicalism, Myerson’s emphasizes their interest in social and political reform. This paper presents a third alternative: that the Transcendentalists be understood primarily as a community of readers invested in reimagining how and why antebellum Americans read, a concern we can see clearly in the pages of the Dial. Margaret Fuller’s article “A Short Essay on …

Negotiating A Feminist Consciousness: Textual Interactions In The Women’S Penny Paper, Emily M. Disher

Masters Theses

This thesis examines both the heteroglossia and intertextuality of three important sections of the Victorian Women’s Penny Paper—the correspondence columns, “Out and About” advice column, and advertising pages. A study of each section in conversation with the others reveals the ways in which the paper built upon the shared interests of its readers to create a community that fostered a feminist consciousness. Ultimately, the intersection of consumer culture and feminist ideals both echoed and shaped by the pages of the WPP highlights the ways late nineteenth-century feminists negotiated their feminist identities amidst complex and conflicting influences.

The Other Half Of California, Jesse W. Goolsby

Masters Theses

In The Other Half of California, a Creative Writing Graduate Thesis for the University of Tennessee, Jesse W. Goolsby has collected a series of short stories that examines how different modes of power influence relationships. He has chosen Northern California as his setting, and the geography of the region plays a key role as the characters endeavor to find their way in, out, and through the landscape, often colliding with each other along the way.